bio
Taylor Baldwin (b. Tucson, AZ 1983) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. He has been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Seven Below Arts Initiative.
Baldwin has exhibited individually at Wayfarers Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) Conner Contemporary Gallery (Washington D.C.) , Land of Tomorrow Gallery (Louisville, KY), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) as well as groups shows at the Queens Museum of Art (Queens, NY), Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Norfolk, VA), the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Craft (Louisville, KY) and Zürcher Gallery (Manhatten, NY). He is currently based in Queens, New York and providence, rhode island.
Statement
A famous and apocryphal quote has it that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. In our current world, capitalism has revealed itself to be, at best, a fraught ideology, and at worst, fundamentally destructive to human and non-human life. Yet its all-encompassing quality leaves us struggling to imagine our way around, through, and beyond it. Given this condition, one of an artist’s most important potential services to their community should be to invigorate our capacity to imagine a world after capitalism. I make sculpture, video, and installations through which I hope to contribute to the collective work of imagining the possibilities of this world.
In my work, I use discreet physical matter as a tool to make visible the ways that massive abstract infrastructure and belief system of capitalism and industry tangibly shapes and reshapes that discreet physical matter as it passes through it. Recently, this has manifested in explorations of alternative material economies - both market-based and not - as they intersect with class, history, culture, and ideology. I am interested in unlearning the authorship-driven, materially-directive modes of fabrication artists have inherited from industrialization, instead seeking ideas as they reside within material at the fringes of commerce. In effect, to collaborate with materials as they exist, and to co-develop ideas in response to the reality of what is deciding whether they fall within or without of the value structures of commercial markets.
In this this exploration I have focused on alternative economies of material that are outside of (or at least after) the global marketplace (i.e. secondary markets, auctions, barter, salvage, reclamation, etc.). The result is a body of work whose physical substance consists almost exclusively of material collected from channels outside of traditional commercial, capitalist transactions. Put another way, I have been working to build a practice predicated on the collection and use of material that is encountered specifically at the point at which it has lost nearly all of its original value - and therefor its legibility - within a capitalist context. It is my hope that at the point where legibility is lost, opportunity exists for a radically transformative legibility to be discovered. Through this, I hope to collaborate with, and contribute to, the collective efforts of countless other vital contemporaries working at this moment towards a similar goal of finding systems of value that exist outside of, even if only temporarily, the seeming totality of consumptive commerce.